Is this the era of humanities over engineering?

Economic Times

03-05-2025

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In the preface to his book The DemonHaunted World, Carl Sagan, the famous astronomer, recalled that when he was studying at the University of Chicago, 'it was considered unthinkable for an aspiring physicist not to know Plato, Aristotle, Bach, Shakespeare, Gibbon, Malinowski, and Freud—among many others'. After all, those were the days when physicists and astronomers were expected to be conversant with the foundational works of philosophy, the arts, history, social sciences and even psychoanalysis.
Sagan's meta point was that scientific training was once inseparable from a broad humanities education. Even in ancient India and Greece, the subjects of yore were grammar, logic, philosophy and the natural sciences.
It is only in the past few decades that STEM education, with its profusion of engineering and medical degrees, has become the only measure of our educational and professional success.
Humanities came to be seen as a last resort, for those not 'good enough' for BTech or MBBS. This preference for STEM has been driven by the relentless technological innovation in the last century with the internal combustion engine, digital technologies, the internet, computing, molecular biology and others reshaping our society, and the education we need to sustain it.
However, I believe that the most recent big technological wave of AI will change the narrative and bring back humanities and the arts, and the human skills and values shaped by it. The launch of ChatGPT started this movement, but the tipping point is the recent advent of Agentic AI, brought to life by OpenAI's o3 and o4 and China's Manus agentic models. While AI chatbots tell us what to do, AI agents can go ahead and do it. Agents have started drafting legal briefs, reconciling accounts, writing swathes of code and scheduling sales calls. If 'software ate the world', agents are about to bite off large chunks of what we used to call work.The obvious anxiety follows: If they do the doing, what exactly do humans do? I believe that humans will still be working, doing the jobs we do and running the world, but there will be a big rethink on what and how we adjust to this new AI-infused world. Many of our core assumptions around our knowledge, education and skills will need to change, as we become co-creators with AI and orchestrators of AI agents. For one, the questions we ask will become far more important than the answers we give. Most of us will remember our parents and teachers saying this often when we were growing up. In the world of instant, deeply researched outputs by AI bots, answers will become a commodity. However, the thoughtfulness and logic behind the questions we ask, how we frame them and how we describe the objectives and the constraints will become very important, as these will elicit the right an swers and solutions from our AI co-workers. These are what we call prompts, and the science of asking great questions is what we are terming 'prompt engineering'. That would in turn mean that the values of curiosity, critical thinking and deep domain expertise to frame impactful inquiries will be the new gold standard. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently echoed this when he mused that 'determining the right questions to pose will surpass the importance of just finding the answers'.What is also very interesting is that whenever we frame the right question or prompt, we are actually writing code—not in Python or JavaScript, but in natural language. Software coding is nothing but the instructions we give the machine in a machine language it understands, to perform a certain task or job. With Generative AI, we now do the same, except that we do it in a human language. Thus, English, or Hindi, or Mandarin becomes the new coding.This inversion dramatically elevates the importance of language, and how well we can use it. Our primary interface with AI agents will be the language we have learnt, and whether we have mastered its nuances of precision, clarity, context and persuasion. Thus, our felicity in how we use language becomes of paramount importance.With AI agents increasingly handling the technical 'how-to' of tasks, the human edge will lie in the 'why' and the 'what next'. The humble subjects of humanities like language, philosophy, grammar and the arts are the ones that provide us the critical frameworks for understanding context, ethics, human motivation, creativity and critical judgment —skills that are inherently difficult for AI to replicate meaningfully.Logic and grammar teach us the principles of clear thinking and communication; arithmetic becomes less about rote calculation and more about understanding quantitative reasoning and data interpretation.Language gives us the superhuman ability to mould words to express the right thoughts. Thus, do not be surprised to see our children preferring humanities to the inevitable computer science or engineering education, and parents rethinking their child's future education.AI will also drive the rise of pure sciences. AI agents excel at engineering solutions based on established principles. Discovering those fundamental principles, however, is the realm of basic sciences. Hypothesis generation, experimental design for novel discovery, interpreting unexpected results and formulating entirely new theories demand a level of intuition, creativity and abstract reasoning that remains uniquely human.The balance of value may shift towards thinking—deep research, theoretical exploration and foundational discovery—as opposed to solely doing or application of known principles, which AI can increasingly automate. Another possible side-effect of the coming of agentic AI will be the return of 'industrial-era' professions like manufacturing. AI is a cognitive technology, and its greatest impact is on jobs of the brain, rather than jobs of the hands. So, mechanical, chemical and aeronautical engineers might actually go join the industries and factories they were actually trained for, rather than join software factories to debug code. This 'return to manufacturing' could be a boon for countries like India.The industrial era rewarded muscle, the digital era rewarded logic and the agentic era will reward wisdom and curiosity. The more the machines 'think,' the more we must feel, question, and dream.
(The writer is the founder of AI&Beyond and author of The Tech Whisperer. Views are personal)